COMPASS DIGITAL
Local Stock and Pricing Management (Centric OS)
Role: Lead Product Designer
Timeline: 2 Months
15 minute read
Who is Compass Digital?
Compass group is the world's leading food service and hospitality company and Compass Digital is the innovation arm of Compass Group North America.
What is Centric OS?
Centric OS is a centralized operating system that manages food services for over 1000 business and higher education institutions. It integrates with partners such as Agilysys, FreedomPay, Nextep, Volante, and KDS.
🤓 Case Study TL;DR
Multi-site restaurant operators were forced to duplicate entire menus to manage stock and pricing by location, creating hours of manual work and frequent pricing errors. I designed a unified solution that separates real-time stock management from scheduled pricing controls, allowing managers to toggle items on/off at individual sites in under a minute while maintaining one master menu with location-specific variations. This eliminated menu duplication, reduced pricing errors by nearly 100%, and became a key competitive differentiator that drove projected migration of 100+ new restaurant sites to the platform.
Understanding the problem
Managers at multi-site operations faced an impossible choice: either show out-of-stock items to customers across all sites, or duplicate entire menus for granular control of stock and pricing.. This duplication forced managers to manually sync every menu change across multiple versions, which created hours of extra work and frequent pricing errors that directly impacted revenue. Centric OS clients were experiencing this exact problem, while our competitors and integrated partners all had working stock and pricing management features, putting us at a competitive disadvantage.
Solution Overview
We created a consolidated stock management interface that displayed only active scheduled menu items, allowing operations managers to instantly toggle items on/off at individual sites. The existing unified menu system was enhanced so that when managers scheduled a menu, it automatically inherited the master content but gave them independent control over availability and regional pricing—eliminating the need to duplicate and manually sync multiple menu versions.
Operations managers can now disable out-of-stock items at individual sites in seconds, while corporate menu updates instantly flow to all sites without overriding local pricing or availability settings.
Key Research Insights
Below: Chart concept indicating the previous(left) and new(right) configuration of menu stock and price management
Design Process Highlights
Key Design Decision: Separating Stock Management from Menu Builder
I collaborated closely with engineers and product stakeholders - we initially planned to add stock controls within the existing menu builder, but recognized this would compound an already feature-heavy interface. Instead, we created a dedicated stock management page for scheduled menus after validating the approach through prototype testing with clients of varying business sizes and technical proficiency. This separation required backend refactoring but positioned the system for the upcoming menu builder redesign.
Strategic Integration: Multi-Level Pricing in Menu Builder
While stock management was separated out, price levels remained within the menu builder, creating the need for a more holistic settings page that enabled users to create multi-level pricing features. This decision maintained the logical connection between menu creation and pricing structure while keeping operational controls separate.
Why this mattered:
This strategic separation allowed us to ship a critical competitive feature quickly without disrupting the planned menu builder redesign. Prototype testing confirmed the solution scaled effectively from small operations to enterprise clients with 15+ sites. Additionally, keeping pricing controls within the menu builder and creating a more robust settings framework laid the architectural foundation for future advanced menu management capabilities.
Impact & Results
Operational Efficiency
Stock updates now take under 1 minute through a consolidated menu list, eliminating the need to navigate multiple duplicated menus. Mobile functionality enables real-time floor management, while backend optimizations ensure instant live publishing to prevent stock discrepancies. The pricing management feature enables advance scheduling of price changes, eliminating last-minute overtime work previously required for manual pricing updates.
Error Reduction & Pricing Flexibility
Multiple pricing levels and regional pricing controls within single menus eliminated the need for duplication, reducing pricing errors by nearly 80% within shared menu systems. Managers can now set different pricing by region without creating separate menu versions, streamlining quarterly and annual pricing updates across all sites.
User Adoption & Satisfaction
Quick adoption with overwhelmingly positive feedback from operators who had been eagerly anticipating these capabilities. The solution finally brought the platform to competitive parity with industry-standard stock and pricing management features.
Business Growth
The comprehensive stock and regional pricing management became a key differentiator for Compass Group's internal sales efforts, with projections of 100+ new sites willing to migrate to centricOS specifically for these management capabilities.